Review in Screen Daily: ‘Just as he was becoming the new darling of the festival circuit, Mendoza’s rising star will stall, at least temporarily, and the film’s commercial prospects should be muted.’
LOS ANGELES, California—“…Pic rates as the year’s mini-scandal thus far,” Variety’s Todd McCarthy commented on Brillante “Dante” Mendoza’s “Serbis,” the Filipino film competing in the ongoing Cannes Film Festival.
Dante’s entry, about a family-run adult movie house, has stirred the critics covering the world’s most prestigious film fest into a frenzy because of its “gratuitous” and “explicit” sex and nudity. But the reviewers’ critical concern—pardon the pun—boils down to a scene where a character graphically pops a boil on his ass with a soda bottle. Yes, you read that right.
But first, the good news: The Hollywood Reporter, through its critic, Maggie Lee, liked “Serbis,” the third Filipino film to make it to the competition category, following “Jaguar” and “Bayan Ko: Kapit Sa Patalim,” by the late great Lino Brocka (whose 17th death anniversary we are observing this week). Some reviewers, while panning (to put it mildly) “Serbis,” praised the performance of the cast, especially Gina Pareño. The veteran actress drew admiring words like “towering presence” and “beautifully cast.”
Hollywood Reporter
Here are excerpts from the very favorable review by The Hollywood Reporter, which bannered “Serbis” as an “engaging domestic drama and stylishly seamy homage to the gay cinema rendezvous”:
“Taking place mostly in a porno theater ironically, yet fittingly, named Family, ‘Serbis’ is part homage to cinema, part intimate domestic drama that vividly details the tangled relations and all-too-human frailties of an extended family running a theater in the provincial Philippines.
“Director Brillante Mendoza continues the neo-realist vein of ‘Foster Child’ and ‘Sling Shot’ in ‘Serbis,’ but displays marked improvement—both the grunge aesthetic and film language now bear his personal handwriting. To this, he adds some bristling sexuality, both gay and straight.
“‘Serbis’ contains elements of soap opera from popular Philippine cinema and TV, but without any of the froth and lather. Unspooling at an almost real-time pace, with a narrative that is all foreplay and no conventional climax, the film won’t win any commercial converts to the Philippine new wave. Festival and art-house bookings are optimistic, though.
Film’s ‘real star’
“The film adopts a worldly and tolerant attitude in dramatizing the double standards in operation every day at a porn theater that has evolved into a hotbed for rentboys to service gay clients (hence the title, which means ‘service’). Gina Pareño (‘Kubrador’) is a towering presence, who puts fire and tears into her multiple roles —as a wife clenching the bitterness of abandonment, an aggrieved mother feeling betrayed by her children’s divided loyalty to their father, and the pillar that holds together the tottering family business.
“But the theater itself may be the film’s real star. Flooded toilets, running sores and steamy sex behind the projector that outperforms what’s happening on screen create a dank, dripping texture and festering mood that echo most of Tsai [Ming-liang]’s oeuvre [’Goodbye, Dragon Inn’].”
Bangkok Post
Bangkokpost.com was also kind to Dante: “…The film has the tarty mix of raw energy of tropical melodrama and the immediacy of social expose, complete with explicit sex scenes, both homo and hetero … Mendoza is a talent to watch—his films (‘Serbis,’ ‘Slingshot,’ ‘Foster Child’) directly tap into the DNA of the Filipino working class struggle, offering a reality so naked, hot and visceral that it requires no sensationalism.”
The other side
Unfortunately for Dante, whose “Foster Child” got good reviews when it was shown in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight last year, most of the other critiques of “Serbis” were, shall we say, less than favorable. Many of the reviewers, like Lee above, wrote about the film being reminiscent of “Goodbye, Dragon Inn.”
Variety’s Todd McCarthy, in his analysis of the first half of the fest on the famed Croisette, seemed to sum up his colleagues’ sentiments in their assessment of “Serbis”:
“Hell of another kind is served up in Filipino director … Mendoza’s ‘Service,’ which stands both as the year’s seemingly obligatory hard-core-sex art picture and, by general agreement, the entry most wildly out of place in the competition. Derided for its pretentious use of sex and a bursting bum boil as metaphors for its home country’s ills, pic rates as the year’s mini-scandale thus far.”
Jay Weissberg, who wrote the full review for Variety, weighed in:
“...Like their cinema, the Pineda family of Angeles City has seen better days. As the morning unfolds, Nayda (Jaclyn Jose) wanders through the labyrinthine bowels of the establishment—which serves as both living and work space—in search of her mother Flor (Pareño). The matriarch has an appointment at court in a bigamy case against her husband ... the lawsuit is dividing the family.
“Nayda’s tramping up and down the staircases allows Mendoza to introduce the entire family, including Nayda’s husband Lando (Julio Diaz), her cousins Alan (Coco Martin) and Ronald (Kristofer King), and sister Jewel (Roxanne Jordan). Latter is first seen naked in an extended sequence where the camera pruriently and excessively explores her nubile frame.
“All this—mixed with scenes of cinema patrons getting serviced—may sound vaguely reminiscent of ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’ or Jacques Nolot’s ‘Porn Theater,’ but ‘Service’ has none of the elegiac elements of the former nor the yearning for connection of the latter. Presumably, Mendoza is looking to use one family’s economic struggle and indifference to the sordidness around them as a metaphor for Filipino society as a whole, though his slice-of-life realism often feels more exploitative than enlightening, unlike his superior ‘Foster Child.’
“…Vet actress Pareño is beautifully cast here, joined by Mendoza regulars such as Jose (memorable in Neal Tan’s ‘Ataul: For Rent’) and Martin… Mendoza appears to have jettisoned his early faith in his audience’s intelligence, continually reinforcing signs (‘No Loitering,’ cheaply lurid soft-core posters) with unnecessary close-ups, and gimmicky final shot adds nothing (sic).”
Screen Daily
Screen Daily’s Howard Feinstein wrote down his musings in the perspective of Dante’s prolific career:
“Since he shifted from production design to directing with ‘The Masseur’ (2005), a static misfire about a gay massage parlor in the provinces of his native Philippines, Mendoza has made up for lost time by cranking out four films since (including one documentary), all low-budget, showing mastery in a variety of genres. With ‘Serbis,’ his first feature with foreign (French) backing, he has taken a giant step in the wrong direction, even if ‘The Masseur’s numbing stasis has been supplanted by an unpleasant, ADD-like dynamism. Just as he was becoming the new darling of the festival circuit, Mendoza’s rising star will stall, at least temporarily, and the film’s commercial prospects should be muted.
“The three features he made between ‘The Masseur’ and ‘Serbis’ focus on personal relationships, whether tender or antagonistic, in the context of social issues in the Philippines; yet ‘Serbis’ fails to develop either front … For the first time Armando Lao, who had supervised Mendoza’s earlier screenplays, has sole screenwriter credit. Might this have impacted the vision of the director, who had previously written his own scripts? Did the additional budget have a negative effect?
“…Strong, charismatic women, such as Nanay Flor and her middle-aged daughter Nayda (Jose), do make their mark, as they frequently do in the other works, a reflection of Filipino family life. Yet events move too rapidly for the sentiment that Mendoza is generally so expert in developing to have any opportunity to blossom here. Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang already successfully mined this material in his ode to the last days of a movie house, ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn.’”
Critic walks out
“Serbis” caused at least one critic, Kim Voynar of cinematical.com, to walk out. Here is Kim’s account, headlined “Live from Cannes: Gratuitous Yuckiness in ‘Serbis’ and Bad Euro-disco”:
“The other night, James and I walked out of our first film at Cannes … Mendoza’s ‘Serbis.’ Actually, this is the first time I’ve ever walked out before the end of a film at a festival; generally, I feel it’s my job to watch films here, the good, the bad and the ugly, and so I sit through them, however wretched they may be. But not this time...
“The film opens with a scene of total gratuitous nudity—a young Filipino girl, just out of the shower, preening in front of a mirror and practicing saying ‘I love you’ in what she thinks is a sexy way. And that scene would have been just fine like that, without the voyeuristic panning down to breasts and pubic hair. I’m not a prude by any stretch, I have no problem with nudity and sex in films if it serves an actual purpose, but watching that scene all I could think of was, well, there’s a shot that exists only to please the guys who have the hots for young, naked Asian girls. Which for me, just made it feel exploitative.
“The film is set in a family-run adult theater with a little café at the bottom that’s open to the street, and the ambient noise in the first 15 or so minutes of the film was so loud and disconcerting that I almost walked out then...
“Mendoza likes to follow people around in their natural setting, and that’s pretty much what he does in this film; unfortunately, it’s just not that interesting, because he doesn’t give us enough about any of the characters to make us care about why we should want to spend 90 minutes or so of our lives watching them.
“… The end of it for me ... was a disgustingly graphic scene of the nephew popping the boil on his ass with a Coke bottle. I’m sure it was supposed to be metaphorical, but it was just gross, and that was enough for us.”
Deemed worst
CanWest News Service’s Jay Stone did not mince words:
“Speaking of grief, most of it was inflicted on the audience of ‘Serbis,’ the Philippine movie from … Mendoza that is the worst competition film in memory. It is an almost hilariously awful story of a family that lives in a porn theatre in Manila, where loud cars provide an irritating soundtrack for amateurish and disgusting mini-dramas and explicit sexual encounters. The scene where a man removes a boil from his buttocks is just one lowlight.”
‘Strange’ film
Uri Klein, in his review on www.haartez.com, the online edition of an Israeli newspaper, opined:
“The family is … central to the Filipino film ‘Serbis’… But the film, directed by … Mendoza, treats this subject in an entirely different way than [Walter] Salles and [Daniela] Thomas do [in ‘Linha de Passe’]… The family members are in conflict with one another and ignore the fact that prostitution is the main activity at their movie theater. The result is a strange film that limps uncomfortably between its realistic and allegorical poles, and although there are effective moments, it does not add up to a satisfying work.”
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We’re thinking that Dante will weather these blistering reviews, reflect on these analyses and, hopefully, dazzle these same critics again someday.
E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com and read his blog, “The Nepales Report,” on http://blogs.inquirer.net/nepalesreport.
